Deathgrippers

HTTYD3 gave us many new things to appreciate and analyze (along with taking our hearts out and stomping on them). One such new jewel is Grimmel’s personal pack of hunting dragons: The Deathgrippers. In this post, I want to analyze their anatomy and abilities, and also discuss why I really enjoyed their involvement in the plot.

I had initially planned my next post to be analyzing Grimmel as the Anti-Hiccup of the franchise… and I probably still will do that in the near future. However, I read some really, really stunning analyses of his character, the worldview he portrays, and his role as the final villain. Quite simply, those pieces made my thoughts look shabby! So, yeah, I probably will still write about Grimmel himself, but not today. Today we I discuss his dragons. 

As far as the overall design goes, I think the Deathgrippers look fantastic. I always liked the scorpion-like design of the Triple Stryke, but that dragon suffered from the tv series graphics (his concept art looked MUCH better). Seeing the stinging tails and powerful forceps on these grizzly looking animals in the full glory of the third film’s graphics was astounding. They looked GREAT. Their color scheme was very imposing, their spins interlocked and looked more like an invertebrate than a reptile, and their tusks were unique, intimidating, and they made biological sense. These are dragon killing dragons, so their teeth are huge and sharp enough to puncture the hides of other dragons. We see Toothless bite viciously at Hookfang’s neck in the first film, but as far as I can tell it leaves no permanent damage. Long tusks, on the other hand, are what the Bewilderbeast used in the second film to immediately kill the alpha. It’s a grotesque but effective weapon.

Aside from their tusks, their fire/acid is also perfectly fine-tuned for killing other dragons. Most all species of dragon appear to be very, very fire-proof, but acid works in a totally different way, giving the Deathgrippers a way to get past their prey’s defense yet again. 

These dragons also clearly had a pack mentality, which again makes sense if they are a cannibalistic species. It’s much easier to hunt prey that is your size if you do it as a group. The also appeared to have a particularly cruel personality, which again works from a biological standpoint. Empathy would make them pity their prey, and their prey is the most dangerous thing they could possibly hunt. This makes them truly frightening and horrible opponents. (That bit with the Deathgripper intentionally trying to drool into the mouth of the warrior he pinned at the beginning made me squirm! That was soooooooo uncomfortable!)

Then you have their venom. Granted, it was a plot device. It is what allowed them to completely ignore Toothless as the Alpha (though as dragon-eaters I imagine they would already have adapted some sort of mild resistance to the alpha system). However, even though the venom was primarily used to generate the (epic) final show-down between Hiccup on Toothless with Grimmel on the Light Fury, it really does mesh well with the design of these dragons. If you are going to hunt other dragons, having a poison that immediately sedates and even PACIFIES them… that’s horrifying. As soon as one of these creatures lands a sting, its prey becomes its puppet; its food becomes its slave. That’s extremely dark, but at the same time, it would make Deathgrippers an apex predator in an environment filled with other massive, fire-breathing reptiles. 

The final aspect that I deeply appreciated about these dragons was their role in the plot. Don’t get me wrong, I love seeing Toothless go up against mountain-sized monsters and beating them, but I always felt like it would be really cool to see an intense dogfight at some point in the series. I mean, it would be just as easy for a Skrill to kill Hiccup and Toothless by blasting them out of the sky as it would be for them to die from a fire blast from the Red Death. You’re dead either way. Bigger doesn’t necessarily mean more dangerous. So, seeing this finale break away from the big dragons was really refreshing. I loved watching these guys tear after Toothless and Hiccup. It felt genuinely threatening, and then it was extremely impressive when Toothless blasted every last one of them out of the sky and vanished without a trace. It really showed off Toothless’s air combat abilities in ways we haven’t seen before in the films, so that was very, very cool. All that to say, I found the threat of the Deathgrippers to be genuine, their design to be intimidating, their biology to be logical, and their role in the plot to be exhilarating.